Marketing: the trade with a hole in the middle?

About 45 years ago, I used to come away from top-level client meetings with a sense of deep despair. 'When will they ever learn?' I'd ask myself. 'Never,' I'd reply morosely.

But I was wrong. They not only learned – but, like many late converts, they allowed their new enlightenment to run away with them. Now, to my considerable surprise, I look back on those very same meetings with affection and respect.

Let me describe one of those meetings to you. From the client side, there would be the managing director, the sales director and the advertising manager. Sometimes the production director was there as well. Neither the CEO nor the marketing director was there because they hadn't yet been invented. The advertising manager had only recently been promoted from his previous responsibilities in office management and stationery procurement: it was seen as a logical progression.

This particular company makes paint. It is particularly proud of its technical expertise: the word thixotropic is used a lot.

The meeting is all about sales. Sales are made not to the people who use the paint but to the people who sell the paint to the people who use the paint: the retail trade. The word 'consumer' crops up from time to time but not nearly as frequently as the word 'customer'. Marketing isn't mentioned at all. The sales director knows his 25 key customers intimately and therefore what they want. What they want is advantageous case rates and eye-catching in-store displays.

The paint was described as the 'product', which indeed it was. Back in the 1960s, those who used the word brand were thought a little flaky. Even by 1968, when account planning was first set up as a discrete discipline, it was called account planning rather than brand planning because brand was thought to be exclusively associated with washing powders and baked beans.

The agency wasn't dismissive of the client's preoccupation with product technology and trade sales: it fully recognised their importance. The entire account group would have spent three days being shown round the factory, interrogating their research scientists and being shown a warehouse full of unshipped stock: a salutary reminder of advertising's only acknowledged purpose. But when it came to meetings, the agency, entirely responsibly, tried to contribute something in the way of strategy. We'd try to introduce concepts such as consumer orientation and brand personality and brand equity and non-functional attributes and the effect that a certain kind of advertising could have not just on volume sales but also on profit margins – and it was then that the client's eyes began to cloud over. They'd been warned about people like us: arts graduates, probably, using fancy language as evidence of superior social status and justification of fancy fees. (Even then I sympathised. For a discipline that's supposed to be ace at communications, marketing's language has always smacked of the mountebank, and agencies are more guilty than most.)

THE MARKETING TREND

At first quite slowly and then with gathering momentum, a trend could be identified. Marketing directors were invented and began to be fashionable. Marketing magazines prospered but seldom featured profiles of research scientists or production directors. Production directors no longer came to agency meetings and copywriters no longer went round factories.

Every respected definition of marketing insists that proper marketing informs the entire enterprise. It begins with the identification of consumer needs and wants, drives R&D and product design – and only then moves into promotion and communication. Those definitions were never formally unchallenged – they just weren't observed.

Marketing came to be seen as a discrete discipline whose responsibilities began outside the factory gates. Selling had always seemed a slightly non-U occupation; marketing was infinitely more respectable; a profession indeed. And marketing directors were no longer expected to be specialists in paint or beer or mortgages: simply in marketing; or, rather, what marketing was coming to mean. Bright graduates opted to go into marketing; but when asked exactly what they wanted to market, they looked bemused. I began to be alarmed by this development about 20 years ago, prompted by trade press announcements of new company appointments. This is one I invented but I can't pretend it demanded much in the way of imagination:

The Anglo-Galvanized Corporation announces the appointment of Clive Thrust as marketing director, Aggregates. He has previously held similar positions with Scottish Widows, Pedigree Petfoods, Rentokil and the Bristol Zoo.

What does this mean? Does it mean that the extraordinary Clive, having acquired a deep and passionate knowledge of pensions, dog chow, pest control and chimpanzees, is now about to become an expert in the composition of cement? No, it does not. It means that Clive, and his disparate employers, no longer think it necessary for a marketing director to have a deep and passionate interest in the product itself. All that Clive needs is a deep and passionate interest in the art of getting rid of stuff – any old stuff, really.

UNDERSTANDING THE BENEFITS OF GOOD BRANDING

The late and still sorely missed Stephen King was as responsible as anyone, I suppose, for helping marketing people understand the real benefits of good brand communication: the softer side of marketing. His paper, 'What is a brand?', first published in 1971, is still one of the clearest and most practical guides to the nature and value of brands. Yet no one regretted more strongly than Stephen the relative decline in status of the engineer, the research chemist, the inventor.

Marketing plans, he observed, rather like marketing people, had become increasingly all-purpose: very little about making something better that people might want, and much about how to get rid of what already existed. Believing as always in the benign power of ridicule, Stephen developed his own, dynamic ten-point plan (see above).

TEN-POINT MARKETING PLAN

1. Upweight 10p-off flashpacks to 80% of throughput.

2. Increase over-riders to selected major multiples and cash-and-carries.

3. Re-motivate salesforce with incremental incentive-linked sales targets.

4. Initiate tailor-made in-store merchandising with dealer-loaders, individualised gondolas and shelf wobblers.

5. Upgrade pack design, to dramatically improve visibility and shelf appeal.

6. Widen distribution to include discount stores and garden centres.

7. Increase stock levels to create product push.

8. Implement a country-wide back-to-back coupon drop to create consumer pull.

9. Draw up a five-year PR plan.

10. Launch a massive consumer promotion to uprate brand awareness and share of mind.

There's nothing truly absurd about any of those purposeful determinations. It's what's missing that's so telling. Not even a glancing suggestion that the product in question might benefit from a bit of refurbishment; and, indeed, absolutely no clue as to the nature of the product or what it's actually supposed to do. (I'm happy to concede that many equally empty ten-point plans have been written by advertising agencies, usually beginning with: '1. Reposition brand in top right quadrant of bi-polar grid, thus achieving consumer salience for both heritage and modernity.')

RAISING THE IMPORTANCE OF THE MAKERS OF THINGS

Today, it seems to me, in my crustier moments, that marketing seriously needs to re-embrace and celebrate design and manufacture. And not just marketing, but the whole nation. I recently came across these words from the year's most respected sage, Vince Cable: 'The superficial glitzy glamour and glittering prizes of the City have for too long overshadowed the essential work of engineers and scientists, the genuine entrepreneurs and inventors, the craftsmen, creative artists and manufacturers who invest in quality and reliability.' In his inauguration speech, Barack Obama honoured 'the makers of things'. Peering myopically into the future – and not just into the next few unfathomable years – it would be wonderful to think that, when asked to name a successful British inventor, we could think of another 50 James Dysons.

Despite all I've said, marketing has come a long way over the last 50 years. There's been a much deeper and more sensitive understanding of real people and how they see brands. Long may that last: preferably expressed in comprehensible English.

I just wish that this new understanding didn't seem to have been at the expense of much of the old passion for product. It really shouldn't be either/or: we need, in the wise words of E.F. Schumacher, one-and-the-other-at-the-same-time.

When product designers and research chemists and inventors apply to join The Marketing Society – and when The Marketing Society welcomes them as essential members of the marketing profession – then we'll have something very significant to celebrate. I just hope it doesn't take another 50 years.